Saturday, November 25, 2006

In Cincinnati, Life Breathes Anew in Riot-Scarred Area - New York Times: And here's the other NYT article today on the city, this one about our local urban resettlement, down in The Queen City. Oddly enough, Richard Florida gets no play here. The journalists are calling it "gentrification." I don't like the way they're loading the words. What's the definition of the "poverty pimp"? Whose interests are served?

"To hear the jackhammers and the booms and the nail guns," Mr. Baum said, "it's music to me."Vine Street runs through the heart of Over-the-Rhine, a neighborhood of narrow streets and ornate brick buildings built by German immigrants from 1865 to the 1880s. After decades of decay in the area, gentrification is spreading north from downtown and south down the steep hillside of Mount Auburn. New condominiums, art galleries, theaters and cafes are bringing people and investment.

But poverty remains, as do drugs, violent crime and the stigma of the three days of riots in 2001. The riots effectively killed an earlier Over-the-Rhine renaissance, in the late 1990s.

The magic of Over-the-Rhine is in its compact brick buildings. Mostly two- to four-story walkups, few are significant individually. But together they create a historic district with a scale and grace reminiscent of Greenwich Village in New York. In May the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the entire 362-acre neighborhood as one of the country' 11 Most Endangered Historic Places."